The Two Faces of Pixar

This article contains plot spoilers of Wall-E and several earlier Pixar films.

The recently-released Wall-E has everything we’ve come to expect from a Pixar film — imaginative characters, stunningly rendered visuals, and an adept blend of humor and genuinely touching sentiment.

Yet its promising surface story — the bond between two robots from different sides of the galactic tracks — turns out to be a lure for the film’s deeper and overly political agenda: criticizing technology and evangelizing Al Gore-style environmentalist ethics.

In Wall-E, humanity has wrecked Earth in an orgy of consumeristic excess, spearheaded by the uber-corporation slash semi-government, Buy ‘n’ Large. Relegated to a multi-generational vacation on a giant space hotel, humans have been infantilized by their reliance on technology.

The analogy is drawn through visually in the baby-like shapes to which humans have devolved. Humans are out of touch with reality, and reduced to passive receptacles of entertainment, courtesy of their fawning robot caretakers.

Pixar's The Incredibles

When it’s discovered that Earth’s wasteland has sufficiently recovered — after 700 years — to allow for a single green sprout to emerge, the space hotel’s nominal captain decides it’s time for humanity to pick up their long-discarded responsibility, return home, and start farming.

At the finale of the movie, the bloated, atrophied humans wobble out of their star-hotel into a hostile wasteland, gleefully anticipating years of hard labor — tilling the soil.

A song from Peter Gabriel carries us through the end titles, lamenting that “we messed up our homeland” and inviting us to “come down to earth.”

This is about as complete an allegory as one could imagine for an environmentalist revolution, wherein an out-of-touch and careless mankind redeems itself by embracing its duty to service mother Earth.

The message is crystal-clear: Consumerism — read: capitalism — equals tacky excess. Technology turns mankind into passive, petty amoebas. Through farming comes happiness.

Were it not for the same signature visual style and top-shelf storytelling, we might wonder if this film came from a completely different production company than uplifting movies like Ratatouille and The Incredibles.

Both movies featured protagonists defined by heroic talents and villains who were mediocrities fueled by jealousy. The Incredibles championed individualism with startling explicitness, ridiculing the you’re-okay-I’m-okay mantras of today’s public schools.

Ratatouille voiced the seemingly populist mantra of “everybody can cook” — yet then elaborated that not everyone could be a fantastic chef, but rather that a fantastic chef could arise from seemingly modest origins — e.g., a colony of rats.

Both films made it clear that talent will find its way to the top in the long run, regardless of conflicts along the way. More importantly, both films offered an implicit endorsement of technology and humankind’s prerogative to enjoy life.

Pixar's Ratatouille

The eponymous Incredibles protected human society, while Ratatouille glorified the Paris skyline and taking pleasure in fine dining — the message in both cases being that it’s a good thing to build cities and enjoy the fruits of one’s labors.

Wall-E, by contrast, seems to stand alongside Cars in its cynicism about humankind and condemnation of industrial progress.

Cars’ protagonist Lightning McQueen is vain and condescending, and the historical expansion of the US highway system is portrayed as a greedy onslaught which impoverished the little guy.

McQueen’s redemption comes from getting off his high horse and breaking bread with small-town folks.

Wall-E is even harsher in condemning technology, showing Earth strewn with mountains of garbage, and portraying humanity reduced to helpless vapidity.

The surface storyline is simple and sentimental — robot gets girl robot — but the real character arc comes from the film’s coddled humans, who vow to ditch their comforts and embrace their duties as resuscitators of the devastated mother planet.

On the basis of these four movies, there seem to be two schools of thought at Pixar about the human condition. In one, we’re told that humans are heroes who thrive from self-actualization. In the other, we’re portrayed as thralls to consumerism who could use a good dose of humility.

The Iron Giant

If such contradictory perspectives seem hard to imagine within one production company, just remember that it mirrors the conflict within many contemporary Americans, who delight in today’s whirlwind of technological advances — and yet pang with guilt over exhaling carbon dioxide.

Both Ratatouille and The Incredibles were helmed by writer-director Brad Bird, who in 1999 brought us the similarly-flavored The Iron Giant. It’s likely that the all-positive outlook of these films stems from his authorship.

Audiences, for their part, seem equally enthusiastic about both schools of Pixar offerings. Time will tell which storytelling camp makes a bigger cultural mark.

Michael G. Shapiro lives in Los Angeles, where he writes music for film, video games, and television. Samples of his work can be found on his web site, www.mikemusic.com. He has spoken on orchestral music and epistemology at The Atlas Society's summer seminar.  He thinks Mr. Incredible could easily beat up Eva.